I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Wise (London, England) in Jun 2021
Interview
I applied through a recruiter for Software Engineer position at London office.
The first call was with this recruiter who was very prompt and answered every question I had. Super helpful and made you feel at ease.
After that a pair programming round was scheduled which got rescheduled due to some issue at their end.
Finally had the pair programming round for 45 mins where there were 2 engineers from their end. One didn't speak throughout the whole interview and the other was rude. It felt like they didn't wanted to be there to take the interview.
The interview started by him giving the hacker rank link and saying that we don't have enough time for introductions and should start with the interview as quick as possible. It was currency exchange question. The question was explained to me and then I was given some time to think and ask questions. After answering some of my questions, we delved deeper into that discussion and started around building a cache based on timestamp. I explained my whole thought process throughout the interview, writing pseudo code along with it. Then a few follow up questions were asked and I answered them, too.
At around 25 min mark, they said they were done and didn't ask me to code the rest of it or even the original question. I was given the opportunity to ask few questions and then around 30 min mark, the interview was over.
Next day, I received the rejection email without any kind of feedback. I replied to them asking for some feedback but haven't received any reply. Once you get rejected you are no more valuable to them it seems.
Overall, the interviewer was very rude, the blog suggesting the interview would be leetcode, hacker rank style is misleading, pair programming was only me programming and hearing his voice in between with a hmm hmm. The company's product and vision is what attracted me and I wouldn't mind re-applying but the interviewers have put some serious doubts about the engineering people and culture.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Implement currency rate api which then became implement cache to store and update and get currency rate.
The interview process was long but designed to test soft skill along with the usual coding. I felt the interviewers looked more at my thought process and evaluated how good of a teammate I would be in Wise’s environment.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The pair programming round was generic one. They gave a class with methods to be completed.
In pair-programming round i got the question on circuit breaker.
They gave an object oriented skeleton code with some placeholders to fill-up. Evaluation criteria would be mostly on if u knew about the circuit breaker before, if u are able to think and propose multiple approaches, how well you can collaborate with the interviewer.
You need not write syntax perfect code as you need not compile or execute it but the code should be optimised enough with right data structures.
I found the overall experience to be quiet good and easier than FAANG.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
About Circuit Breaker that count failures in time based window
Applied online. Received online assessment link. Gave their hackerrank test which had 2 coding questions. All test cases passes. Immediately received automated mail that recruiter will contact you. After few hours got email that they have decided to move forward with other candidates.
That is my application was not even reviewed by the recruiter(which usually takes 1-2 mins) before sending the test link.